The web has offered an ever more dynamic and interactive user experience. Throughout the 90s, most of the web consisted of static pages or server-side rendered pages. Frames and iframes made it possible to reload parts of the page in a limited way. When Ajax appeared in the mid-2000s, it allowed pages to be much more engaging. Client-side JavaScript could now request data from the server on demand and update the page dynamically.
Real-time web applications are the next step in this evolution. These are applications where the server pushes data to clients without the clients needing to initiate a request. This allows a user to be notified of new information or for users to interact with each other in real time.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
Establishing a two-way communication channel between the client and server
Adding real-time interactivity to our application
Introducing a backend to scale our real-time application across multiple...